Mark Leuchter, «Inter-Levitical Polemics in the late 6th century BCE: The Evidence from Nehemiah 9», Vol. 95 (2014) 269-279

The Levitical prayer in Nehemiah 9 contributes to the gola-ideology running throughout Ezra-Nehemiah, but scholars have generally recognized that its compositional origins are to be connected to the Homeland communities of the exilic or early Persian periods. The present study identifies features in the prayer which suggest that its authors were Levites associated with the Homeland communities and that these authors crafted the prayer in response to the exclusive and elitist ideology of the gola groups. The prayer testifies to tensions within Levite circles well into the Persian period and possibly even beyond.

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271 INTER-LEVITICAL POLEMICS 271
Deuteronomy. The great hostility preserved in Ezra-Nehemiah toward the
homeland population (a feature that permeates every redactional stratum
of the work) 10 would certainly have been directed to the Levites of the
homeland as well. Thus when Nehemiah rallies “the Levites” to his gu-
bernatorial cause, this most likely did not include Levites connected to
groups that the gola returnees rebuffed and rejected.
This fracturing of Levites into separate camps must have been a point
of special contention and debate. Though the image of a united Levite
front in Ezra-Nehemiah may be rhetorically motivated, it presupposes
some semblance of an earlier reality when Levites in late monarchic Judah
had galvanized in different ways. From the late 8th century BCE onward,
Levite clans had developed a sense of tribal kinship, had adopted Moses
as a patron saint, and shared ownership of ancient liturgical traditions de-
riving from the pre-state period 11. Throughout the 7th century, most had
also endured socio-economic disadvantage and marginal or liminal social
standing in the wake of Hezekiah’s program of urbanization (705-701)
and the subsequent devastation of Sennacherib’s campaign (701) 12. By
the end of the monarchic period, the early edition(s) of Deuteronomy be-
came symbolic of the Levites’ vital role in mediating between YHWH and
Israel, and certainly bound Levites together in a sort of solidarity as the
monarchic infrastructure began to crumble 13.
Levitical solidarity must have been tested, however, when the condi-
tions of exile fractured their ranks. Those in exile adjusted their shared
traditions in response to their own experiences (leading to expanded ver-
sions of the books of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah later utilized in the Ne-
hemiah Memoir, for instance) to which homeland Levites were not privy
during the period of Persian restoration, and to which these homeland
Levites could not turn as icons of their own identity 14. For those Levites
10
JANZEN, “The Cries of Jerusalem”.
11
COOK, Social Roots, 262-266. Cook argues that the Levites were a tribe
dating to the pre-state period. Other scholars have provided evidence to the
contrary, but both P and Deuteronomy identify them with tribal language.
Cook’s observation about the Levite promotion of pre-state traditions is
therefore still applicable, though Levite tribalization may be the result of their
own evolving social function and organization over a long period of time.
12
N. NA’AMAN, “Sojourners and Levites in the Kingdom of Judah in the
Seventh Century B.C.E.”, ZABR 14 (2008) 237-279, here 274-279, though
some of NA’AMAN’s skepticism regarding northern Levites residing in Judah
will be challenged below.
13
See above re: the Levitical contribution to the construction of Deuteronomy.
14
See especially M. LEUCHTER, The Polemics of Exile in Jeremiah 26–45
(New York – Cambridge 2008) 161-176, for the Shaphanide development of
tradition in an exilic context.